Projektino.com provides a social networking online platform for small and medium seized businesses (SMBs). Prior to releasing the Projektino collaboration tool for online collaboration and project management, we were using other online collaboration tools available on the market to do our business. We found that the most useful functionality of such collaboration tools was the possibility to discuss project and company specific issues via a “Messages” feature, where everybody on a project could share their point of view and comment on other people’s input.
Compared to having a discussion by exchanging e-mails, the whole conversation was automatically stored in one place with a logical thread and could be reviewed later e.g. by people who could not participate in the discussion when it was being held. This collaboration tools feature proved specifically important on projects, where discussions where focused on solving problems or finding creative solutions. The stored discussions served as a knowledge bank for other teams in future projects.
The second most important feature we found, while using online collaboration tools was the possibility to define and add To-do lists and tasks. Although it is very tempting to fire an e-mail to somebody with a short notice what has to be done, having all tasks collected in a structured way with clear responsibilities and due dates pays back fast in a project.
Consequently, when we decided to develop the Projektino application for online collaboration, it was built around these two features i.e. Messages and Tasks. We also set as our goal to create an intuitive user interface that would give clear overview of all information associated with each project such as activity feeds, milestones, uploaded files, as well as of people with their responsibilities and resources related to projects that they were working on. .